bike culture blogged

An Open Source Stem

CW&T wrote to tell us about their Blockhead stem. It’s a big, chunky CNC, stem of boldness that’d take a chunk right out of your knee.

Most interesting is it’s open source. They’ve licensed the design under Creative Commons for personal use. That means you can mill it yourself, make a version of it to mount an iPhone or espresso, but not sell it. We didn’t think about open-sourcing the big block of aluminum we milled for the Stokemonkey but hey!

If mill-your-own stem becomes popular, expect an aftemarket on Etsy for padded stem cozies that’ll protect you from those sharp edges.

What is cool is that the got this too market (sold two so far). Every few weeks, a cad drawing from an industrial design student makes the rounds of the design blogs, and is usually never seen again.

Open Sourcing a design isn’t a first in the bike industry. QBP did it with Xtracycle. Of course that meant, you’d have to deal with QBP and that’s a bit of a challenge for their competitors who make their own proprietary longtails or eventually will.